From Hiroshima To Chernobyl

For us, and for many of our readers, it has become a tradition to mark the August 6 and 9 anniversaries of the atomic bombings in Japan with public prayers and protest. At those gatherings our theme is often simply to remember the victims. This year it won't take much imagination to remember the nuclear victims. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, they are all around us.

As this is written, Soviet radiation victims are still dying. Radioactive "hot spots" are still turning up in Scandinavia, and crops are being plowed under in large portions of Europe. Meanwhile, the invisible poison is settling into the blood and bones of countless longer-term victims, who will become the guinea pigs in a ghastly real-life experiment.

By now there have been scores of articles, commentaries, and editorials (from Pravda to "Nightline") on "the lessons of Chernobyl." On the U.S. side, the lessons have mostly been about the Soviet Union's unique brand of totalitarian inefficiency. On the other side, the lessons have involved the heroism of the firefighters and medics, with a mild slap at bumbling party officials in the Ukraine. The ruling elites on both sides remain largely unshaken in their devotion to the peaceful atom. Very few have learned the lesson that there simply is no safe or democratic way to manage nuclear technology, peaceful or otherwise.

There have been exceptions. In a rare moment of public insight, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz recently mentioned his concern that the radiation from Chernobyl was roughly equivalent to that from only one of the world's 50,000 nuclear war-heads. In his belated post-Chernobyl speech to the Soviet people, Mikhail Gorbachev made that parallel more explicit. Echoing Albert Einstein's comment that the bomb has changed everything but our way of thinking, Gorbachev described the accident as "another grim warning that the nuclear era demands new political thinking and a new policy."

Acting on that logic, Gorbachev took the occasion to announce yet another extension of the Soviet Union's unilateral nuclear testing moratorium. The Soviet freeze, which began on August 6,1985, will now run to August 6 of this year. Gorbachev also repeated his invitation to President Reagan to join him in a summit meeting on nuclear testing to be held anywhere in Europe or, he added, "perhaps in Hiroshima."

IN THE UNITED STATES, Gorbachev's statements on nuclear testing were again either ignored or dismissed as mere propaganda. That was a little easier to do this time. Gorbachev was clearly practicing the ancient political art of trying to change the subject of the debate from his weakest point to his strongest.

But even accounting for rhetorical chicanery, Gorbachev's gesture was not just symbolic. As any Soviet general would no doubt tell you (and as they are certainly telling Gorbachev), there is from the Soviet perspective a very real military sacrifice involved in abstaining from nuclear tests for a year while the United States goes ahead exploding first-strike warheads and Star Wars prototypes. For his own reasons, which have mostly to do with a long-range view of Soviet self-interest, Gorbachev is genuinely interested in stopping and reversing the nuclear arms race and is willing to take some losses to do it.

Unfortunately neither radiation poisoning nor enlightened self-interest seem able to dent the political thinking of our American commissars. Within weeks Gorbachev's second-mile gesture had been answered by the U.S. renunciation of the unratified SALT II strategic arms limitation treaty. The renunciation came in late May, when President Reagan announced that the United States would dismantle two old Poseidon submarines (keeping us under the SALT II limits), but only for budgetary reasons. The statement went on to say that we intended to violate the treaty limitations on air-launched cruise missiles in the near future and would no longer consider ourselves bound by treaty obligations unless the Soviets radically altered their arms control posture.

The conditions regarding Soviet behavior were kept deliberately vague, but they seemed mainly to involve the Soviet stance at the Geneva talks (i.e. rejection of Star Wars) and U.S. charges of Soviet treaty violations. Like most of Reagan's arms control proposals, the terms seemed carefully designed to force a Soviet rejection.

The Reagan administration's claims of Soviet treaty violations have been floating around Washington for a few years now. Whenever they've been publicly aired, the charges have received the scorn of members of Congress and former arms control officials. The administration claims that the Soviets have violated SALT II provisions on missile (not warhead) testing, development of new missile systems, and total number of delivery vehicles (namely bomber planes).

In each case the available data could be interpreted in a number of ways. And at different times various administration officials, from George Shultz to arch-hard-liner Richard Perle, have acknowledged that some of the charges are dubious. There is a U.S.-Soviet consultative committee in place to settle such disputes. But one arms control expert recently told the New York Times that our delegate on that committee "is authorized to complain, but is not authorized to resolve the issue."

Oddly enough the Reagan renunciation of SALT II also meets the disapproval of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. They've always been big supporters of SALT II, recognizing that it places important limits on Soviet military power. THE SALT II TREATY was never the arms control panacea of liberal dreams. At the time of the ratification debate, Sojourners criticized the treaty as simply the legitimation of an escalated arms race on both sides. But if the significance of the treaty was doubtful, the significance of Reagan's renunciation is plain. It reflects the administration's implacable drive for nuclear superiority on every front and its ideological refusal to reach terms of coexistence with the Soviet Union.

In the face of that kind of cold-blooded intransigence, it becomes all the more important for us to simply remember the victims--from Hiroshima to Chernobyl--and hope that the power of their suffering can move public conscience when reason seems to have failed.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.